Announcement: The Agent Communications Panel for CRM - CRM + OCS + ACP = WOW!

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Now you will learn why I in March blogged about UC and OCS. The reason is - besides that UC is great and enables business development and improvement within communication processes - that we have made and now released the glue that binds CRM and OCS together to empower yet another big step for all companies.

The glue is called Agent Communications Panel - ACP. It offers a lot of improvement possibilities including:

  • make the employees CRM desktop aware of customer in focus and the history, ongoing orders, projects etc. – directly and automatic access all CRM knowledge
  • by looking up the customer in CRM on incoming phone call the employee will have displayed customer data and saves valuable time plus is fueled with extra valuable knowledge
  • more effective internal communication on customers, customer cases, projects, pipeline, ongoing tasks and other relation processes
  • exchange 'customer' above with the contact points in your line of business and repeat all, for instance vendors, patients etc. - xRM!

 
Example of how ACP looks for the customer care worker.

What is the Agent Communications Panel (ACP)?
ACP is an application add-in to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 by the Office Communication Services (OCS) team. It combines Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2.

What does it do?
It enables contact center and call center agents to manage their communications (make calls, receive calls, conference, and chat) from within their Microsoft Dynamics CRM system.

Technical info
The Agent Communications Panel is an XAML browser application (XBAP). It is published to a Web server and opened from a Web browser.
ACP is released in English and there are no plans to release the ACP in any other languages.
The OCS team has released the technical documentation on the download site.

Get & use
The ACP is a free download and is supported by the OCS team.
To get it and learn more go to the Microsoft download center here.
To read more about UC go here.
To read more about OCS read my blog posts from March 2009.
To read more about CRM go here.

 

Enjoy! :-)

Martin Houlberg Jensen
CRM Evangelist
Microsoft Dynamics CRM team